For Owen Cross, the only thing that matters more than family is farming. As the oldest Cross brother, the land is his legacy, and he’ll do whatever it takes to make Cross Creek a success—including hiring local widow Cate McAllister to manage the bookkeeping tasks that are growing in his office like weeds. Cate’s as pragmatic as she is pretty, and she rattles his hard-fought composure at every turn.

Cate had known a lot of things about her husband before he died three years ago in a car accident, but how much debt he’d gotten them into wasn’t one of them. She needs her job at Cross Creek, even if her boss is both gruff and gorgeous. But Owen’s a family man, through and through, and the last thing Cate is interested in is anything—or anyone—with strings attached.

As Owen and Cate join forces to right the farm, they discover there’s more to the other than the surfaces shows, and that passion can be found in unexpected places. Can Cate heal from the loss of one family to gain the love of her life? Or will the past prove too much for the promise of the future?

I’ve always been interested in Kimberly Kincaid’s ‘Cross Creek’ series, for its 3 brothers so wildly different that it was almost a guarantee you’d get very different stories out of them. ‘Crossing Promises’ is Owen Cross’s story— the pain-in-the-arse grump, the responsible brother, the long-suffering (and not too silent) chump and it wasn’t hard to develop a soft spot for the own who bore things on his shoulders and carried on for everyone else because he needed to.

Unfortunately, this particular book disappointed me more than the rest in the series, more so because I was looking forward to Owen’s story. But my dislike stemmed from my inability to get on with this pairing, with a ‘heroine’ I found more annoying than sympathetic and one who looked as though she needed to be treated with kid-gloves lest her sensibilities be offended.

As work partners, Cate and Owen were fabulous. Their synchronised way of running Cross Creek was a marvel to behold and for most part, it was enjoyable to see Owen happy and settled. I empathised with Cate from the start, seeing her struggle with the memories and as well as with how she found it hard to get back on her feet.

But ultimately, Cate wasn’t a protagonist I could get on board with at all. While I understood how she wanted to move on with her life as her own person, I never quite got past the idea that she remained fragile as glass, turning to frenzied baking as a way to deal with her unsettled state of mind. That she also kept something fairly monumental from Owen until the end put her straight in the ‘stupid’ category for me and I thought that the fault could be roundly laid at Cate’s door for that. To use children (or the lack of them) a method to ‘rein’ someone in or as a way of shaping a particular lifestyle however, is an idea I absolutely despised and while I hated how it’d been done to Cate, I hated it even more when she’d unconsciously held it over Owen later without even realising it.

The definition of the family/family legacy (and the issue of children) was made out to be a problematic one here and that eventually, did become an issue here for me as well. What I didn’t like was Cate’s lack of compromise at the end with the conflict that came up—both Owen and Cate were entitled to their own wishes—but I was fairly unhappy with the rushed ending that had Owen bending backwards for Cate who essentially, used the bitter lessons from her past against Owen.

For Cate not giving Owen’s view on family any consideration at all killed it for me and while picking sides isn’t exactly that I want to do in a romance, and the ending of ‘Crossing Promises’ somehow did that for me. In fact, I thought the story ended in a way (with Owen’s grovelling that really felt like forced repentance after a talk with Marley) that never suggested Cate had merely thought about what she’d wanted, then selfishly held those up to Owen as a checklist to see if he would be with her in spite of it.

I definitely wished I could have given this a better rating because I’ve always liked Kincaid’s writing. But because I could barely tolerate Cate as someone for Owen, ‘Crossing Promises’ simply went south too unexpectedly for me.

Cocky farmer Eli Cross plays twice as hard as he works. When his latest stunt drums up a heap of negative PR for the family farm, he grudgingly agrees to play host to an ambitious New York City photographer. Her feature on Cross Creek could be just the ticket to show the country what the Cross brothers do best…which is more problem than solution for Eli.

Scarlett Edwards-Stewart has photographed everything from end zones to war zones. She’s confident she can ace this one little story to help her best friend’s failing magazine. At least, she would be if her super-sexy host wasn’t so tight lipped. But the more Scarlett works with Eli, the more she discovers that he’s not who he seems. Can his secret bring them closer together? Or will it be the very thing that tears them apart?

Eli Cross’s modus operandi is to operate with a firmly-affixed front of cocky deflecting, grinning-and-bearing, and simply be labelled as the good-for-nothing brother who’s also the least hardworking one on the farm that is in sore need of a good financial haul.

But his love has never been for agriculture like the rest of his brothers and being stuck in that position means to just stay as much under the radar and keep his love for journalism under wraps until it, well, all blows up in his face. And as we all know it, it does, upon the arrival of a famous photographer who’s out in the middle of nowhere as a favour for a friend.

I just wasn’t too convinced at the reason he had to keep his love for writing a secret because it simply doesn’t seem like something to be ashamed about. That he didn’t assert his own love for it while working on the farm was quite incomprehensible to me.

What was surprising though, was that the cocky, hell-if-I-care exterior was nowhere in sight when Scarlett shows up and tags along. He’s distanced but polite at first, without the charm that I thought he’d be laying on thick to deflect Scarlett’s curiosity about his personal life. Initially, I had a hard time figuring out how Eli/Scarlett would work out in ‘Crossing the Line’ but it eventually became clear that they were displaced in their own, similar ways—and acted out in an opposite manner—and in so doing, rather poignantly find their common ground.

I wasn’t entirely sure what purpose the last bit of drama that came in at the end served though (apart from inserting the customary-ending conflict between Eli and Scarlett) and that kind of threw me off the narrative a bit. The ending as a result, came rather abruptly and we don’t really know how Eli/Scarlett work their arrangement out past their love declarations so that felt a little unfinished.

That part aside, Kimberly Kincaid’s writing is always lovely to read. It’s flowing and easy, and ‘Crossing the Line’ is no different. Thee three Cross brothers are well on their way to get their HEAs and because the grumpy ones do tend to excite me more, I’m already expecting Owen’s story to be a hoot.

Hunter Cross has no regrets. Having left his football prospects behind the day he graduated high school, he’s happy to carry out his legacy on his family’s farm in the foothills of the Shenandoah. But when a shoulder injury puts him face-to-face with the high school sweetheart who abandoned town—and him—twelve years ago, Hunter’s simple life gets a lot more complicated.
Emerson Montgomery has secrets. Refusing to divulge why she left her job as a hotshot physical therapist for a pro football team, she struggles to readjust to life in the hometown she left behind. The more time she spends with Hunter, the more Emerson finds herself wanting to trust him with the diagnosis of MS that has turned her world upside down.
But revealing secrets comes with a price. Can Hunter and Emerson rekindle their past love? Or will the realities of the present—and the trust that goes with them—burn that bridge for good?

Kimberly Kincaid’s new series is quite a charming, heartfelt one and definitely one of the more engaging small-town stories that I’ve read for some time.

Hunter Cross—farmer extraordinaire—captured my imagination from the start and as foreign as this farming thing is to me, he’s vividly drawn enough that his bond to the farm and family cannot be disputed even as he struggles with an own injury and problems that threaten to weigh him down. An old flame returns though, for reasons that she will not disclose, but as things go, attraction and a shared history might trump that even.

There are many things to like about this book, undoubtedly: the assured writing, the small town feel that Kincaid creates so superbly and the great pacing and development of the relationship that’s supposed to be the HEA this time around. But What I found hard to accept though, was Emerson’s pushing away of the man she walked away from—under the erroneous but ultimately patronising claim that was pretty much ‘I did it for your own good’—12 years ago and her present-day lashing out at him because of her fear of her illness becoming public.

And yet that it was Hunter who has to grovel in the end to fight for their relationship. Far be it from me to dictate how a character deals with the traumatic news of a debilitating illness but I thought Emerson had mostly treated Hunter atrociously from the beginning. Illness or not (which incidentally, doesn’t provide a legitimate excuse for behaving badly), I found it hard to like her as a bona fide heroine because of this.

Kincaid does portray all too well how much less brave (and perhaps irrational) an illness can make a person, but I’d hoped for a less clichéd sort of conflict however, but it seemed as though it was always Hunter who had to make active inroads for the both of them which I hadn’t liked, each time Emerson retreated behind her growing fears.

This is a good start nonetheless; I liked the familial conflict laid out in the Cross family and the brothers’ stories that already lie in wait.